However, my problem with the article was not so much Frankel's embrace of Judith Miller, but his implication that no real crime was committed and Fitzgerald should not have compelled the journalists to testify.

This wasn't a case of whistle-blowing. This was a case of Administration officials using the media to discredit a war critic by outing his CIA agent wife through allegations that his trip to Africa was the result of nepotism and therefore his findings on that trip were not worthy of belief.

"Libby's reasonable expectation that reporters would keep his confidences -- and protect his perjury -- was foiled by some weird mishaps and finally by the shrewd maneuvers of a passionate and politically independent prosecutor. "

Never should the shield be allowed to be used for such nefarious purposes. Journalists must insist that PERJURY not be what the shield defends.

Other selfish motives can be justified. Not that.

Libby could have refused to testify. He should have. Or admitted it. Either way. But to use the reporters' privilege as a perjury shield is simply over the line.

"On Tuesday, July 8, in what his normally detailed calendar listed only as a "private meeting," Libby spent two hours at breakfast with Judith Miller to enlist her help in countering Wilson's attack. He told the grand jury that he admired her reporting, on Al Qaeda and chemical and biological weapons, and presumably also her prewar articles lending credence to the administration's wild alarms about Iraqi W.M.D.'s -- credulous articles that The Times eventually disowned."

Frankel utterly ihnores the June 20 disclosure by Libby TO MILLER of this classified information.

Knowing of Armitage's role, why didn't Fitzgerald fold his tent and return at once to his "day job" as U.S. attorney in Chicago? Because Libby's already evident lies to the F.B.I. and Fleischer's multiple leaks in far-off Uganda convinced him that there had been more than a single careless source. He smelled an illegal White House smear campaign and thought Libby could help him crack the case. And if Libby persisted in his story before the grand jury, he would at least have a perjury case -- if, against all precedent, he could force reporters to testify.

Against all precedent? I wish. My job would be a breeze. The precedent is largely the other way.